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The Cooked Seed by Anchee Min: Review

Just off the plane from China, Cultural Revolution survivor Anchee Min went in search of the washroom at the airport after landing in the United States. It was her first realization that life from then on would be very different for her.

There were no waiting lines and after closing the stall door, Min, whose first memoir Red Azalea, an international bestseller published in 1993 detailing her struggles in Shanghai under the Mao years, saw a roll of toilet paper.

It was so pure and white and soft to the touch, that Min’s first thought was how much it would cost to use it.

She would not use it if she had to pay, she decided, and carefully she sat down, pulled the paper a few inches and looked around, prepared for an alarm to go off. Then she smelled the faintly fragrant paper so texturally different than the rough toilet paper she had packed with her in her suitcase and it was free to use. At that moment, she knew she had landed somewhere completely different from what she had known back in China where six adults shared one room to sleep in and the single toilet in the compound was used with 20 other neighbours.

“It was China’s midnight and America’s morning. I was about to drop out of the sky and land in Chicago. What made me scared and nervous was that I didn’t speak English and had no money,” Min writes in the opening chapter of her latest memoir The Cooked Seed.

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She was 27 years old and life for her had ended in China. She was considered Madame Mao’s trash for her years working in menial jobs at the Shanghai Film Studio, the movie factory where Mao Tse-Tung’s wife ruled and instigated denunciations. Anyone who worked at the studio was tainted as one of Madame Mao’s dogs and Min’s reputation was already ruined. For her association with Madame Mao, she was considered a cooked seed, unable to sprout.

With $500 in borrowed money and an airline ticket that alone cost fifteen years of her salary, Min had plans to go to School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she had received an acceptance letter. Her visa, as all were, was granted only to those who showed promise and potential to contribute to the United States.

But Min’s dream of a new life almost ended even before it could begin. At customs, she was pulled aside and her English skills, which she had stated on her visa forms as “excellent,” were questioned. At the American consulate in Shanghai, she managed to demonstrate her English skills by charging forward like a “bleeding bull” as she wrote, sing song-ing her way through the interview.

But in America, Min’s bluff was discovered. U.S. immigration officers threaten to deport her before she could even leave the airport. She begged for the chance to stay. “I don’t need much to live. I’m an excellent labourer. I’ll deport myself if I don’t speak English in three months.”

Given her chance by an understanding translator, Min made good on her word. She became adept at finding ways to make enough money to survive those first years in Chicago while studying at art school. She drew paintings on underwear, worked as a security guard, waitressed at a Chinese restaurant. In nearly all the places where she worked, it was a battle of reducing her diminishing returns. Some days she earned negative amounts due to the bus fare she paid to get to her low-paying jobs.

With sparse, sometimes clunky and also memorable passages of elegant writing, Min details her desperate bids to make a living and find love and happiness in America.

There are moments in The Cooked Seed where the writer’s remembrances are so harsh and painful that it seems that what she is doing is providing a lesson to her daughter Lauryann, born in America who never had to endure what Min did in order to carve a new life for herself. The bleak landscape she details have such a lingering effect that even in the final chapters when Min writes of meeting a Vietnam war veteran who wants to marry her and help her raise Lauryann, the reader anticipates that this too will go terribly wrong. At the realization that there is finally an ending in The Cooked Seed that is not tragic, the reader’s relief is as palpable as the writer’s.

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